“They didn’t really have a salmon smell,” Wilson said. While many looked normal, others were deformed, their jaws “going two different directions,” he said. “I wouldn’t eat ’em.”

Within weeks, Wilson and other Lummi fishermen managed to catch about 391,000 pounds, which they put into cold storage in Bellingham, Washington, while they figured out what to do with it. By the end of September, they were in talks to sell it back to Cooke.

While tribal and state officials looked on, representatives for Cooke painstakingly counted the iced Atlantic salmon so they knew how much to offer.

Cooke doesn’t comment on sale negotiations, said Nell Halse, a spokeswoman. In addition to buying back fish, Cooke hired a salvage company to clean up the site and offered to help study the environmental impact, Halse said.